A pretty guest room

One of the rooms that I worked on last week while I was out of town was their guest room. The room was about 80% finished. We had started it last year and when I had come on board the bed and armoire (that holds the television) were already in place. Before seeing the space in person, I had selected the beautiful Serena & Lily damask bedding, found a mirrored chest at HomeGoods which we used for a nightstand and the client had found the lamps. During my first visit, I selected the carpet and paint. What the room was still missing was fabric to reupholster an existing chair, window coverings, a bench at the foot of the bed, new shades for the existing lamps and a new pillow to brighten up the bedding. The walls could use some artwork as well. Those were some of the things I needed to work on during this trip.

The way that I like to work is to combine custom upholstery with ready-made items to help keep costs down. And so I am always thrilled when I can walk in a store and find something ready to carry out that works. Which is exactly what happened when we went into the local Target store and found this geometrical pillow with the black welting.  It was the perfect thing to break up the matchy-match bedding.  The black welting stood out because of the black bed and the green was just 'off' enough to make it interesting.

I found this cute little pillow at Target - and it was just right!

During this trip we had quite a few upholstery projects to address, so with our punch list in hand, we went to look at fabrics. For the guest room we wanted to recover an existing chair and find a fabric for a bench. This is what I choose for the chair:

Norbar Prism Spring Collection / Pattern: Athens   Color: Watermelon

I like that this fabric ties in the bed (the black), and coordinates with the bedding but it also brings in some fresh and pretty colors. I think it would look nice to welt the chair in black too - to really make it pop. The golden colored flowers go well with the wall color and actually helps the walls "make sense" and the pink just felt fun especially with it being Pantone's color of the year (Honeysuckle). The Serena & Lily bedding is welted with pink fabric if you look close at the photos.

For the bench I selected this flocked fabric - I fell in love when I saw it:

Robert Allen Home / Pattern: Fleur flocked  Color: Kohl

I really liked how it looked with the chair fabric and I loved the idea of it at the foot of the bed. But when we were out shopping we found a very inexpensive bench - ready to go - and it worked great, which fits into my philosophy. So I think this fabric will be used for a nice pillow for the bed or to throw on the chair. It is too great to not use at all! Honestly, I can see this fabric on the chair as well!

Essex Bench from West Elm - $249.00, mirrored nightstand from HomeGoods.

The windows will be finished off with Roman shades like these that I had made for this room:

The lamps shades that are on the existing lamps will be replaced with white linen drum shades similar to these from Pottery Barn:

What was nice was that while I was working on the room (and the house), I was staying in the guest room so I was able to get a really nice perspective on what the room needed and on the entire house actually - how the clients lived in it, what worked and what didn't. Since I like to couple organization with design, it is nice to really see first hand how a house functions for a client. I shared the master closet makeover in a previous post (you can see it here if you missed it) and I will share more of what I did while I was up there in a later post!